14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia will officially release their new mid-range graphics processor, codenamed the D9M, as the GeForce 9600 GT. The company has issued the technical specifications for the chip, and, according to these, the new 9600GT will come with a 650 MHz core clock and a 1625 MHz unified shader clock.
The main difference between the D9M and the older G84 core inside the 8600GT is that the former will feature a 256-bit memory bus interface. The 900 MHz memory clock will give an overall memory bandwidth of about 57.6 GB/s. The producer did not specify how many shaders or stream processors the D9M core includes, but the texture fill rate is estimated at about 20.8 billion pixels per second.
Rumors about the D9M series continue to emerge on the dedicated forums. For instance, it is alleged that the GeForce 9600 requires a 400W power supply that can provide at least 26 Amperes on the 12V rail. Moreover, the chips will require additional power through a 6-pin supplementary power connector, unlike the previous GeForce models in the mid-range area.
The graphics processors in the D9M family will include native support for Microsoft's DirectX 10.1, Shader Model 4.0, OpenGL 2.1 as well as PCI - Express 2.0. According to Nvidia, the 9600 GT chip will support the Quantum Effects physics processing engine. Although the GeForce 9600 is HDCP compatible, just like any other Nvidia processor, it will depend on the vendor implementation.
The new GeForce 9600 GT chips will be built at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp.'s (TSMC) foundry and will use the manufacturer's 65-nanometer processing node. The new technology has been introduced earlier in November 2007, in the G92 family of chips.
There is no official word on pricing or market availability, as we all have got used with Nvidia's products. However, Nvidia representatives claimed that the performance gain between the newer GeForce 9600 and the GeForce 8600 is "almost double."